According to progressive faith, the “arc of history” always bends Left. Well, history just spawned Donald Trump, and if European political trends are indicative, this is not an isolated incident. For leftists, this is akin to if Christians woke up to find Jesus’ bones had been discovered.[How, exactly, would that be proved?]It shattered their faith.

The freak-out is especially acute among millennials. These are the “nones” and the “spiritual but not religious” bunch we’ve heard about the past decade. Millennials, we were told, didn’t abandon faith per se—can the human spirit truly live without faith?—they simply redirected it away from “organized religion” toward other things, chief among which was politics. I wonder how that’s working out for them.

As ridiculous and ubiquitous as the pathetically referenced “stages of grief” has become to explain how they feel about losing an election (!), the depth of leftist grief does magnify the essential religiosity they place on politics……..

The author then goes on to explain the gnostic overtones, which is fine, but probably not terribly interesting to most of my readers.

I’d also go much further than the author – basing many of my conclusion from Fr. Dominic Bourmaud’s research – that leftism isn’t an “accidental” religion, but was designed as such from the start. Not consciously (at least at the start), but in effect, because the point of rationalism/secularism/liberalism/modernism/leftism was always one and the same: to usurp the power of Christianity in Christendom – which in reality meant the Church – and to replace it with a materialist/rationalist conception of the universe. As Leftism gained more and more influence over the culture it became more and more open in its violence against the Church and more and more strident in its claims, positing an origins story, providing moral strictures to be observed, and even providing visions of “heaven” and “hell” on earth.

We’ve now just about reached end game in his process with thorough penetration of Leftism into all the churches and sects, and with whole generations being raised who – by and large – have no conception of what Christianity is, what it means, and why it is unique and most powerful in comparison to all the other religions of the world, including their own.

If you go back to Monday and go through my series of posts on Leftism as a sort of arc, the conclusions are, I think, not too difficult to see. Outside miraculous conversion, the Left is inveterately hostile, desires the total destruction of Christianity, is a deliberately formed means to persecute Christianity, is endlessly corrupting, and is both unreachable and unteachable. This is a very harsh assessment, but not an unfair, or inaccurate, one. Dealing with an inveterately hostile competing religion requires a very different approach from interaction with souls not so ill-disposed. Tread very carefully.

As for retaking the culture from this anti-Christian religion, that’s a work of generations, and even then our collective efforts to date feel more like a desperate and not terribly effective rear-guard than any kind of counter-revolution. I’ve long felt the sense we need a change of tactics, but that’s really probably a matter of another post.

It is no accident that even the LGBT movement has established its own set of ‘feast’ days, ’ember’ weeks and ‘dedicated’ months in direct competition to and in a twisted mockery of the true faith. It is a religion unto itself complete with its own set of fanatical even militant devotees and evangelists. They can’t reproduce, therefore they must recruit.

Regarding a change of tactics…I’m not sure anything can succeed except to duplicate what the Left has done over the past sixty years or so. There must be a concerted effort to re-take the social institutions, slowly and one step at a time: academia, the news media, entertainment media. You’re right, it will take generations. But so did the Left’s takeover. The advantage to this approach is that it works like the fable of the frog in the saucepan. The disadvantage is that it takes coordination and effort, with leadership from families and parish priests.